SUNY series, Critical Race Studies in Education

Jason E. Cohen, Sharon D. Raynor, Dwayne A. Mack, Jason E. Cohen, Sharon D. Raynor, Dwayne A. Mack

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438482279
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación multicultural

The college classroom is inevitably influenced by, and in turn influences, the world around it. In the United States, this means the complex topic of race can come into play in ways that are both explicit and implicit. Teaching Race in Perilous Times highlights and confronts the challenges of teaching race in the United States—from syllabus development and pedagogical strategies to accreditation and curricular reform. Across fifteen original essays, contributors draw on their experiences teaching in different institutional contexts and adopt various qualitative methods from their home disciplines to offer practical strategies for discussing race and racism with students while also reflecting on broader issues in higher education. Contributors examine how teachers can respond productively to emotionally charged contexts, recognize the roles and pressures that faculty assume as activists in the classroom, focus a timely lens on the shifting racial politics and economics of higher education, and call for a more historically sensitive reading of the pedagogies involved in teaching race. The volume offers a corrective to claims following the 2016 US presidential election that the current moment is unprecedented, highlighting the pivotal role of the classroom in contextualizing and responding to our perilous times.

PART I

AFFECT AND AUTHORITY IN THE CLASSROOM

Historicizing the Moment, Historicizing the Curriculum

CHAPTER 1

ON NATIVE AMERICAN ERASURE IN THE CLASSROOM

SCOTT MANNING STEVENS

This thing of darkness we acknowledge ours.

—paraphrase of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, V.1.275–76

There is a current trend among high school and college students wishing to force their schools and universities to drop offensive mascots, change school seals and crests, and pull down statues of morally dubious forebearers. One thinks of the student-led movement to force Amherst College to retire its old mascot, “Lord Jeff,” a character representing Lord Jeffery Amherst, the British colonial general who suggested Native Americans be given blankets infected with smallpox, or the school crest of Harvard Law School, which was based on the coat of arms of the family of Isaac Royall Jr., who endowed the first law professorship in the eighteenth century with wealth derived from the slave trade.1 More recently we have seen student activists take it upon themselves to remove offending icons, such as the “Silent Sam” statue of a Confederate soldier on the grounds of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the late summer of 2018.2 Over the summer of 2020, following the massive public demonstrations sparked by the police murder of George Floyd, the efforts to remove statues of Confederate leaders and those of Columbus have made it impossible to avoid the debates around commemoration and general education concerning our nation’s violent history.

From the perspective of institutions of higher education, these actions speak to an elusive goal of moral purity that seems to place the offending idea, person, or event outside of the student’s immediate culpability. It is a wish to disassociate completely with any such moral or ethical blot and make emphatically clear “this is not of me.” While motivated in part by a desire to force institutions to face their pasts, such desires to purge institutional histories of inconvenient truths are just as likely to serve the moral narcissism encouraged by the self-fashioning phenomena of social media. It seems everyone wants to be on the side of the angels, except for that considerable hoard who embrace the machismo of open bigotry, racism, sexism, and a general lack of human decency. While this latter portion of the population holds considerable political sway over the nation, college students can cocoon themselves in a sense of self-righteousness. But these same students are often far less rigorous in undertaking the self-examination required of those who wish to acknowledge the moral legacy of the United States as regards Native America.

We less often hear of students organizing on a campus to force its administration to acknowledge that the university or college sits on Native American land, nor do they demand that Native communities be justly compensated for those lands. This is as seemingly impossible as repatriating oneself back to Europe or one’s ancestral homeland because you realize the entire enterprise of the conquest of the Americas was wrong from its inception. In some cases recently, faculty and students have pushed their schools to institute a “land acknowledgment” that expresses awareness of the fact that the school occupies land which originally belonged to a local Native nation. But too often such acknowledgment statements are treated as ends in themselves and not the beginnings of much more difficult conversations. Only certain historical mistakes may be redressed—or even contemplated for that matter—but those wrongs committed against the Indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere are not usually among them. Perhaps there is some sincere but obscure feeling of collective guilt about the conquest of Native America, but there is little to nothing suggested in the way of reparations or other forms of social justice. The social problems of this country are profoundly complex given the legacies of slavery and structural racism or economic and gender inequalities, but the issue of Native America surely deserves its own discourse within the history of the United States.

We must consider when addressing Native American issues in an American college classroom that most students have never heard, discussed in a classroom setting, the most pressing issues confronting today’s Native American communities. The depressing reality is that the average American student does not learn much about Native America at school after fourth grade. That means, beyond nine or ten years old, students almost never revisit the subject of Native American history while being formally educated. Because of the persistence of the “vanishing Red Man” trope, Native people are presumed absent and consigned to the distant past. Add to this the fact that possible Native American presence in the classroom often goes unrecognized because Indigenous students may not fit a stereotypical phenotype or other notions characterized as “Indian.” We have been written out of the curriculum for most young adult students, and the hard truths of genocide, land dispossession, forced assimilation at boarding schools, or the involuntary sterilization of Native women will never confront these students unless they choose at some point in their college education to study various aspects of Native American history and culture. Nor will they likely think of our nations as diverse and contemporary communities given that, since their childhoods, we have been consigned to the past.3

While one portion of our students demands institutional purity, the other half is openly annoyed or angry upon learning about the violent and racist foundations of the nation they smugly inhabit—not so much angry that it happened, but angry to be reminded of it. Fed a steady diet of the “American dream” with a master narrative of “freedom, equality, and opportunity for all,” they cannot fathom why this remnant of the original Americans will not simply “get with the program” or “get over it” and just be American. What little exposure they may have had to Native American cultures as children was likely firmly imbedded in the national mythology of Pocahontas and John Smith, Squanto and the first Thanksgiving, or Sacagawea and Lewis and Clark. A side glance to the Trail of Tears may or may not occur at some point in their education, but the reality of institutionalized ignorance concerning Native America is overwhelming. One result of the absence of Native Americans from school curricula is that tremendous pressure is then transferred to museums to be the unique institutional source of knowledge production on this topic. School field trips and visits with families may be the only time students are asked to learn about Native America outside of the classroom, and museums are taken to be authorities on this issue. The same issues regarding the national narrative and the presence of Indigenous perspectives occur here, as in schools, and only more recently have institutions such as the National Museum of the American Indian been created to address some of those problems.4 Even as such institutions attempt to critique earlier misperceptions, they meet resistance from settler audiences and federal funding agencies. Many Indigenous scholars and other scholars of color in this and other settler-dominated societies will recognize this feeling of hostility aimed at instructors and institutions who critique the master narrative.

Maori law scholar Ani Makaere wrote of the difficulties she faced when teaching the colonial history of Aotearoa (New Zealand) to her Pākehā (non-Maori) students: “Their ignorance meant that it was left to me to teach them history that they should have been exposed to as a matter course while at school. But what made it much worse was that the students appeared to hold me responsible for the guilt that they felt at learning about what their ancestors did to mine. Complaints to the Dean that Pākehā students were being made to feel culturally unsafe in class were not uncommon.”5 Likewise, the late Canadian Mohawk scholar Patricia Monture-Angus wrote that she refused to silence herself on the topic of Indigenous history “for the sole purpose that the oppressor will not feel badly,” going on to say that “trying to force me to be responsible [for their feelings] is a powerful tool intended to silence.”6 When non-Indigenous students note that neither they nor their more recent immigrant ancestors caused any direct harm to Native Americans, and so why should they care, I ask them if they have benefited from dispossession of Native peoples. I also remind them that to Native Americans this history has a daily effect on our lives now.

But I do not wish to draw attention to these issues without offering some strategies for correcting a bad situation. Short of the necessary major educational reform at all levels of schooling in the United States, I believe there are several key concepts that non-Natives can learn and integrate into their teaching across a variety of disciplines. In the rest of this essay I shall name several of these key concepts and provide a general explanation of them and some thoughts about how we might apply them to our classroom experiences. First among these concepts is one whose articulation has evolved within my lifetime as a scholar; that is the notion of settler colonialism. This term came about in the work of Australian scholar Patrick Wolfe and Canadian scholars Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis in the early 1990s. The term was used to distinguish between models of colonialism practiced by primarily European countries in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries—but in some cases beginning even earlier. The distinction lies between extractive colonialism and settler colonialism. The extractive model meant that certain nation-states, whether constituted as kingdoms, empires, or republics, sought to control regions in remote parts of the world in order to extract their natural resources and labor and enrich the metropole, or capital city, back in the colonizing state. Such was the case in much of Africa during the nineteenth century, when European powers scrambled for control of African territories so they could exploit their wealth and natural resources, which included human labor. Colonial control was achieved more through administrative and military means and less through European emigration to these territories.

On the other hand, a settler colonial model focused on gaining possession of territory so that it could be resettled by the colonial powers after the Indigenous populations were vanquished and removed. Patrick Wolfe identified “the settler colonial tendency that [he termed] the logic of elimination.”7 In the Anglophone world, this is most apparent in the modern nation-states of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. In each of these former British colonies the emphasis was on the permanent acquisition of Indigenous lands and the gradual replacement of the Native population with a settler population. All of these nation-states, which at one time were composed of populations that were 100 percent Indigenous, now have Indigenous populations of approximately 10 percent or less of the general population. The settler colonial story is a replacement narrative that seeks to consign the Indigenous population to the past through a process of extermination, removal, assimilation, and erasure. Settler colonialism is not, as Evelyn Nakano Glenn reminds us, an event that occurred in the past “but an ongoing structure.”8 In her work, Glenn makes clear that settler colonialism not only dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their lands and sought to exterminate them and their cultures, but it also “transplanted certain racialized and gendered conceptions from the metropole [or colonizing country]” and “transformed them in the context of and experiences in the New World.”9

Because of the radical demographic shifts that settler colonialism imposes, there can be no progress toward a postcolonial existence. Unlike extractive colonialism, which can be thrown off or exhausted, the settler colonial state, by its demographic composition, can maintain a state of permanent colonial hegemony. Students in the United States learn of the struggle for independence from Great Britain, but that does not make us a postcolonial society; rather, settlers determined to cut their allegiance to the metropole and form a new independent colonizing nation-state. Such euphemisms and slogans as the “Empire of Liberty” or “Manifest Destiny” provide cover for the United States’ imperial ambitions—made clear through the Louisiana Purchase, Indian Removal, the Mexican War, the Indian Wars, the acquisition of Alaska, and the annexation of Hawaii and other territories in the Pacific and the Caribbean. The average American student is trained not to examine these expansions too critically, and attempts to do so are frequently interpreted as unpatriotic. I agree with those who contend that if a high school or college student were taught American history as settler colonial history we would have a vastly better educated body of citizens in regard to a more complex and accurate study of American history and the issues of social justice.10

For our students to understand more fully the systemic aspects of settler colonialism in the United States, they would need to be introduced to juridical and legislative history that has allowe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1. Affect And Authority in the Classroom
• Part 2. Scholar-Activism: Teaching for Social Justice
• Part 3. Precarious Institutions, Precarious Appointments
• Part 4. Historicizing the Moment, Historicizing the Curriculum
• Afterword: Teaching Race within Criminal Justice
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover